Welcome to Living in a Bookworld, which basically is a blog full of what else but books. Here, you can find and read reviews about books from the young adult, fiction and not, and sometimes the adult section. Also, every month is going to be dedicated to an author or two. You will be able to see the new books that come out every week as well. Let the book journey begin!

Wednesday, 6 January 2016

Blog Tour: FLOOR 21 by Jason Luthor {Excerpt} @JL_TheProfessor

As humanity
lives out the remainder of its existence at the top of an isolated apartment
tower, young Jackie dares to question Tower Authority and their ban on
traveling into the tower's depths.

Intelligent and unyielding, Jackie ventures
into the shadows of the floors below.

But will her strong will and refusal to
be quiet—in a society whose greatest pride is hiding the past—bring
understanding of how humanity became trapped in the tower she has always called
home, or will it simply be her undoing?

My name is Jackie, and it’s not so bad living here.
Seriously. At least, I don’t think so anyway, but I guess it’s hard to say.
Then again, I’ve never really been anywhere else. I’ve rarely even been below
Floor 12. My parents won’t let me. They say things get bad down there, so I
have to stay up here, on the higher levels.

Don’t get me wrong; I mean, I wish I
didn’t have to. Things get kind of boring, walking the same halls every day.
I’m always trying to find something new to do, but it’s kinda hard when you’ve
lived your whole life in the same tower. Sometimes I’ll wander up to the
rooftop, where we have the gardens. That’s where all of our food comes from, so
we all take turns planting and harvesting. I don’t mind the work, actually,
unless it means pulling carrots. Those suckers are really hard to yank out of
the dirt.

When I think of it, it’s actually
kind of annoying having to go to the rooftop, and not just because of the work.
It’s really more about what we have to pass by as we head up there. So, the top
level of the Tower is Floor 1. None of us are allowed inside, so every time we
go up the stairs, we’re forced to stare at that big, golden number—the number
“1” that sits on the locked entry door. I really wish I knew what was inside,
but you know, nobody’s allowed in. Instead, we just have to pass by every few
days when it’s our turn to work the gardens. You might as well string some
candy in front of my face and tell me I’m not allowed to eat it.

Of course, you can’t just pick
vegetables all day. That gets boring quick. Besides, most of the time I’m in
school. Well, school’s probably too strong a word for it. We meet most days of
the week in the library on Floor 6. Our teacher, Mrs. Bloom, tries to lead
class the best she can. It’s just too bad our books aren’t great. A lot of them
are about to fall apart, and most of them were scavenged from the lower floors.
I’m not talking about something like Floors 13 or 14. I’m not even talking
about Floor 21. I mean the books were taken from way down
below . . . like, as far down as Floor 30.

I know, right? I can’t believe it
myself. That’s what we have the Scavengers for, though. Without them we’d never
get new books or supplies. They’re pretty much the bravest people in the Tower.
They say that anyone who makes it onto a scavenging team is the type that could
have been a police officer or even a soldier before all this happened. I mean,
that makes sense. They wear all that riot gear, and it looks like they know how
to fight. Sucks, though, since as tough as they are, every once in a while we
lose one of them. That just goes with the territory of being a Scavenger.

Point is, life is only livable
because of them since it’s not like we’re rolling in things to do.

Sometimes
I’ll sit around in the lobby with the other kids and watch movies on the Blu-Ray
player, but that doesn’t always work. For instance, if it’s a really cloudy
day, then the solar panels on the roof will die out, which always sucks for
everyone. If we want light then, we have to burn candles, and we don’t have
many of those. Then again, we don’t really have lightbulbs, either. Well, we
have a few. Want to take a guess where we get those from? Yeah. Scavengers. We
get everything from them.

I kinda always wanted to be one. Who
wouldn’t want to be? They get to see stuff from a long time ago, before we had
to live on the top of the Tower. Speaking of that, nobody really talks about
the Before, and I’m not even sure how much anyone knows about it. I guess it
makes sense to think that once upon a time we lived on the lower floors. Maybe
even the ground . . . if there is a ground. I’ve never met
anyone that’s seen it, not even the Scavengers, and they’ve been farther down
the Tower than anyone.

When you stop and think about it, I
mean, our lives don’t make sense. We couldn’t have always lived up here, right?
It gets me pretty antsy thinking about it because, I mean, this is a tower, so
we had to have come up the stairs at some point. Didn’t we?

I don’t know, and thinking about it
gets me frustrated. When I’m in this kind of mood, I go to the rooftop and look
out. You can actually see other towers rising up in the distance. Some aren’t
even that far from ours. I stare at them, and I’m just
like . . . is anybody over there? Is anybody looking back
at me? Does anybody know or remember we’re trapped in this place?

Or are we all that’s left?

After I’ve gotten myself
sufficiently depressed, I’ll stare over the edge of the roof, trying to see how
far below I can look. Thing is, it’s impossible to see much. This tower just
vanishes into the Darkness. Nobody, and I mean nobody, even knows why. It’s
just blackness down there.

Oh, about Floor 12. Yeah, that’s
where the Creep really starts. The Creep? It’s
this . . . gunk. Super-disgusting stuff that you shouldn’t
touch because it makes you feel weird, and the lower down the Tower you go, the
more you see it. It starts to cover the walls, and it’s kinda gross. It’s
really slick, like saliva, and it looks all muscle-y. Almost alive. Good thing
you don’t have to worry about it when you’re higher than Floor 11. Still, I
wonder what it is. We all do. I know that when you touch it, you can start
hallucinating. I did once. Well, okay, I’m lying. I’ve touched it a few times
when I’ve been on the lower levels, which is why my parents made the rule that
I couldn’t head down there in the first place. I mean, I don’t pay attention to
them, but I get why they don’t want me going that far below into the Tower. The
Creep makes you see . . . things. Shadowy things. Sometimes
they’re right in front of you, but most of the time, they’re in the corner of
your eye. They say that by Floor 21, you don’t even have to touch the Creep to
hallucinate, which is a total trip. Must suck to live down there.

Still, I
wonder. I wonder about this all the time, actually. I wonder about what’s below
Floor 21.

About the
Author

Jason Luthor
has spent a long life writing for sports outlets, media companies and
universities. His earliest writing years came during his coverage of the San
Antonio Spurs as an affiliate with the Spurs Report and its media partner, WOAI
Radio. He would later enjoy a moderate relationship with Blizzard
Entertainment, writing lore and stories for potential use in future games. At
the academic level he has spent several years pursuing a PhD in American
History at the University of Houston, with a special emphasis on Native
American history.

His inspirations include some of the obvious; The
Lord of the Rings and Chronciles of Narnia are some of the most cited fantasy
series in history. However, his favorite reads include the Earthsea Cycle, the
Chronicles of Prydain, as well as science fiction hits such as Starship
Troopers and Do Androids dream of Electric Sheep?